Artist Screens Blue-Sky Documentaries for Potted Plants

Conceptual artist Jonathon Keats begins screening films for potted plants Thursday in a specially built “cineplex” in New York City. Specifically, the flora will be seeing travel documentaries showing off glorious European skies.

Will the green cinematic scheme backfire when the plants are too entertained to foresee their possible extinction?

“Our destruction of the environment is bad news for plants,” the brain-teasing Keats, who also pens Wired‘s Jargon Watch feature, said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com “I think it’s only fair that shrubs and trees know what’s happening, that they realize that the cataclysm they’re experiencing locally is truly global in scope.”

The Strange Skies installation projects film of European vistas directly onto its plant audience.Images and video courtesy of Jonathon Keats

His new plan is to start spreading the eco-news in an installation called Strange Skies at the AC Institute, a nonprofit arts institution in New York. He built a specialized cinema for potted plants (and any humans who want to bring their own leafy friends). Running through March 13, Strange Skies will give beleaguered plants a chance to escape from New York for a bit, and live a dream life unencumbered by their pots and roots.

“These documentaries expose them to parts of the planet they could never experience for themselves, allowing them to travel vicariously by showing them a selection of foreign skies,” Keats said. “To our untutored eyes, these horizons may look pretty, but plants are photosynthetically attuned to subtle variations in the spectrum, including those caused by atmospheric pollutants. Make no mistake: These documentaries are incendiary, and may be infuriating to many vegetables.”

But Keats is not a cinematic agitator, or even a vegetative socialist. He just wants to compel natural innovation by any means necessary.

“Botanical scare-mongering is not my intent,” he said. “Plants are major players in the carbon cycle that we’ve so catastrophically disrupted over the past couple hundred years. Seeing Strange Skies may inspire them to evolve new methods of carbon sequestration. Or they may simply find a way to lay dormant until the human species goes extinct.”

Natural outgrowth of porno for plants

This is not Keats’ first foray into film for plants. In fact, his early cinematic efforts on that count were similar to those working in film for humans.

“Like most aspiring filmmakers, I started out in pornography,” he said. “Several years ago, I shot some porno for plants — titillating stuff showing bees pollinating flowers — and screened it for audiences of rhododendrons and zinnias. And I’d like to think it was a success with those audiences. But pornography is pretty repetitive, if not downright boring, and so I started thinking about other subjects that might appeal to botanical audiences. Travel films were an obvious choice.”

While he’s showing off Strange Skies in Chelsea until March, his master plan is to migrate the experience to the internet. That way, humans worldwide can provide their faithful houseplants a means of cinematic escape. And Keats is asking for Wired.com’s help with that noble cause.

“I want my documentaries to reach all plants everywhere, from indoor ferns to giant sequoias,” Keats said. “While opening more theaters might help to facilitate that, I’m no James Cameron. In truth, the only feasible mechanism for worldwide distribution is the web. So I’m releasing Strange Skies on the Underwire, and encouraging people to show it to their houseplants and in their gardens. It’s easy to do: Just turn off the lights, or wait for night if the plants are outside, and then move your PC or cellphone close enough to your botanical audience to illuminate the foliage with the glow of the screen. Then hit Play and your plants will experience the skies of Europe vicariously.

“I’m also encouraging people to make their own botanical travel documentaries and to post them on YouTube,” he added.

Will Keats’ plan work? Plants and humans have entirely different ways of perceiving and processing such information. Modifications to the light spectrum are a must, which is why Keats has reoriented the viewing technology and experience for maximum plant impact.

“Showing Strange Skies to larger audiences takes special equipment,” he explained. “Since plants don’t have eyes with which to focus images at a distance, the projector needs to be aimed at them, shining the film directly onto their leaves. What plants experience is an overall modulation in the spectrum of light above them. To simulate that experience in a theater, I suspend a translucent scrim between the digital projector and the audience, diffusing the imagery. I want to be careful to provide the plants with a photosynthetically appropriate experience, not to anthropomorphize them. It’s bad enough that they have to share the planet with us, without the added insult of being treated like humans.”

Sub-botanical cinema

Given that pernicious insult, wouldn’t it make more sense for Strange Skies to incorporate some vegetative revenge cinema? Wouldn’t films like, say, Little Shop of Horrors or even James Cameron’s galvanizing eco-conscious epic Avatar mix in nicely with beatific footage of European skies?

Nope, says Keats.

“I’m sure that at some level Lassie is stimulating for dogs and The Lion King may stir curiosity in some cats, but those movies were not made with a canine or feline audience in mind, let alone for their exclusive viewing,” he said. “Strange Skies is specifically shot, edited and projected for plants. Visiting the theater in Chelsea, a human is likely to feel left out. And I think that’s a good thing. In fact, if Strange Skies has a secondary significance, it’s that sense of alienation: As a species, we’ve made ourselves the center of attention, and we categorize all other organisms as subhuman. Strange Skies gives humans the chance to sit in a room and feel sub-botanical.”

Keats has plans to follow up Strange Skies with a second travel documentary, filmed this time in the United States. Given that he lives in San Francisco, the next one “features a lot of fog,” he said. The hope is to bring the sequel to Europe in 2011, and pursue festivals in Italy and beyond.

Keats has no plans, however, to move beyond cinema to climate engineering in an effort to bring plants the skies they want in real life.

“I’m not smart enough to attempt geoengineering,” Keats said. “Humans aren’t smart enough. Trees may make fine geoengineers. My hope is that Strange Skies will gently nudge them in that direction.”